Ada and PJ went together to the burnt patch of bush. PJ plodded, and Ada didn’t go too fast either, since she had a wheelbarrow and the seven seedlings she had grown from the seeds she salvaged there. It was time to plant them. She wanted to communicate this all to William Blake, who had survived the fire in part, which is why she stood for a moment there, showing off the seedlings. There were tiny smoke-blue shoots climbing his branches.
Now that the canopy was gone, Ada could see the fullness of sky everywhere. She could see the hills behind and if she stood up she could even see the glint of a tin roof that was the Laytons’ old house. She still thought of it as Toby and Alice’s house, even though it now belonged to people Ada didn’t even know. No matter how Ada looked back at the summer, she couldn’t help feeling that something had reared up, a sort of force that came right up out of the earth and flung everything off balance. She partly blamed the old windmill, since it had stood like a sentinel at the beginning and end of everything. It had jangled loudly with a satisfied sense of portent and gloom, and now it was as silent as the air. What had come up must have come out of the old windmill’s hole and gone back inside it too. It had dragged the truth so far inside that no one could see it anymore. Bones had filled the hole; the hushed, gone-away bones of the past. The withholding of things had gone against the telling of things, and the clash of telling and not telling unleashed a violence, as pressing and as mighty as the sun. Only Ada had the memory of it now, a secret stamped on her.
Summer, when it went, took the hot whiff of sky and the stench of secrets with it, but something had sunk so deep within her that it had transformed itself, like far away bones and burned trees, into the strange and careless agitation of her soul.
Ada stared up into the burgeoning new shoots of William Blake and began to sing him, her travelling-along song, Did you ever come to meet me, Farmer Joe, Farmer Joe. She stomped out a circle to help her decide where she would dig the holes. PJ lay down in the shade and watched her with one eye. After a while she tired of her one line of song over and over again and wished she could remember how it went on. That was what she wanted to think about. Not the way the summer had gone.
There was no reason why time, instead of stopping, could not also go round in circles like she was. Like the sun did. And the moon. And PJ, when he was about to lie down. If time kept always marching away from you, then you had to run after it and keep up or you would be left behind like that old deathly windmill, rotting over the hole. Ada didn’t want to be nothing.
The way she saw it, the new Ada Bloom was beginning. Her trees were beginning too. William Blake was regrowing. There would be a new forest to go along in. Time would not run away from her there.
She straightened up and began to skip. What she needed most of all was a new travelling-along song. Soon she would be in double figures. All she had to do to keep going was just do what she had done to get there already. Tilly had sent her a card with a painting on the front that was just colours, like pools of water, bleeding into each other. Like time slipping from one moment to another. Ada would tell Tilly that was what it was on the telephone. In the meantime she would look after her trees, she would pat them down in their holes and she would bring them water. And she would warn William Blake that she would now also be reading novels.
PJ lay and watched, though sometimes he closed his eyes and kept one ear open instead.